Book News Roundup: The Jhalak Prize winner has been announced

The Jhalak Prize, Britain’s award set up to celebrate marginalized and BAME writers, was won last week by Jacob Ross, for his crime novel The Bone Readers, which follows a police officer named Diggers working on a small Caribbean island. It is the first in a proposed quartet of books, titled the Camaho Quartet.

In other book news:

Derek Walcott, the award-winning poet and playwright, died this past week at the age of 87. The Nobel Prize and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant-winning Caribbean writer was an influential figure in literature of the last half-century.

“For poets, it is always morning in the world. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world – in spite of history.” Derek Walcott 🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/eMhO0MPKIX

The premise of New Zealand author Eleanor Catton’s new book has been revealed. Birnam Wood is an apocalyptic story and psychological thriller, which pits super-wealthy weapon-bearing citizens in rural New Zealand against a band of locals in a fight for survival as the world turns on the bring of ecological disaster – a far cry from Catton’s award-winning epic The Luminaries.

Richard Flanagan, author of the hugely successful 2014 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, will have a new novel out this year, titled First Person. This will be released in the UK in November 2017.